Are we really putting our beauty standards onto fruit now?

Who cares if it looks like a butt, it still tastes like an apple!

Okay, try thinking about the expanse of cosmetic standards throughout today’s society. Things like beauty magazines for girls, Dolly and Girlfriend, bashing our lil’ female babies with makeup tips and diet ideas. You’ve seen it, you know, it’s old news but it’s still terrible and nightmarish.

Other things like TV and film shaming pregnant mothers for being overweight, ugly and hormonal; advertisements pulling on fat people for jokes, you know the drill: same old sick, sad world.

But I had never, ever, thought that this cosmetic standard would impact the way our world eats. There are people starving all over the world, but because our corporations don’t want ugly fruit up on their shelves, they decide it would be better off left to rot.

Maybe they think we won’t eat it? The CEO for Woolworths wouldn’t reply to my tweets questioning why he won’t give two-legged carrots the same opportunities as one-legged ones, so I couldn’t tell you for sure.

I can only imagine it would go something like this. A CEO walks up to a table and sees a normal looking apple, and a fused double apple, which looks not unlike a human butt. The CEO picks up the normal apple and says “perfect, sell it to the people”. He then picks up the other apple and says, “disgusting, this apple looks like a human butt, and people won’t want to eat things that look like butts.”

His assistant scribbles all of this down, and the CEO then goes to lunch and yells at the waiter for serving him a ham and olive salad which looks way too much like his grandma Jan’s post tracheotomy neck, so obviously he cannot consume it. It just makes no sense.

Well I guess it does; it isn’t reasonable in the least, but you can understand, reluctantly, why they might take that approach. But the point to which you may stop being able to understand, is when you find out that around 16 billion tonnes of ugly fruit is being disposed of or goes unharvested each year, in the US alone.

What this brings me to is how utterly harmful the value of image is on our world. A truly brutal, violent and completely unnecessary reality for this world to exist in.

It’s a messy situation. There are 795 million people in the world who are food insecure, who can’t lead themselves a healthy life. So why is it so easy for certain people to dismiss this fact, because a kiwi fruit has a Siamese twin?

Give people a choice where both fruits are regular standard items, and they would probably pick the normal ones. I’ve seen it before at markets and at home – my friend has a pomegranate tree, we pick at it and most of them only pick the normal ones, for no solid reason. I do it too; I’m no hero in this story.

It just traces back to the superficiality of today’s society. We pick the pretty looking ones because that’s what we value, and we believe that it’s a reflection on ourselves as a person.

As a society, we remain blind to the vast spectrum of beauty in this world, perhaps out of convenience, and close mindedness, or perhaps an intermingling of corporate decisions on what we see, hear, touch and feel as human beings.